1. More kids survive today. The new asthma medicines are fantastic and great strides have been made treating premature infants. Twenty years ago, a lot of severe asthmatics would have died in infancy or from pneumonia as children.
2. City kids are told to stay inside and watch TV or play video games. Their mothers figure they'd rather have fat kids than pregnant, drop-out, drug addicted kids. It used to be if you lived in the city your mother would tell you to go outside. Those days are gone.
3. The improved medications result in more kids being diagnosed with asthma. Twenty or thirty years ago kids who wheezed occasionally when they got a cold were said to be prone to bronchitis - they had to stay in bed with the vaporizer going til they got better. The new drugs give these same types of kids much easier winters, but now they get the asthmatic label.
First of all if cases of Asthma ARE increased in Harlem (andI would have to see some peer-reviewed studies that bore that out and showed when they ramped up) of course Robert Kennedy took into consideration the attack on the World Trade Center and the fact the city was covered in toxins as a result.
Over two years after the attacks, when I visited there you could still see workers cleaning the brick buildings from caked-on soot from that horrible day. You would see what looked like insulation laying alongside the curbs and gutters, almost as if as they wash off the sidewalks, yet another layer of this stuff would be washed into the streets...
IMHO Robert Kennedy really showed his ignorance to place blame for this directly at Bush's doorstep. Heck, when we moved to the desert and CLEAN air, my husbands asthma returned. He'd not been bothered for many a year when we lived in the smog basin called Southern California, but in the clear air of the Arizona desert, he is.
In addition: Buildings in the Harlem district of NYC are old and were built before regulations against asbestos and lead paint. As these old buildings are vacating and being rehabilitated (this is becoming the next "it" place to move in NYC since Clinton located there) they are removing the toxins in these buildings... then you have the types of heating systems, they are old! They get dusty... I could go on and on, but surely Robert Kennedy doesn't think we should pay to move these kids out of Harlem and tear down these old buildings? Perhaps, the Kennedy family could start a refurbishment program with some of their money! instead of expecting tax payers to bare the costs...
And...if he's so concerned about alternative energy sources for automobiles (while he and people like him fly around in private jets burning more fuel than I'll burn in a lifetime) these "wealthy" individuals should start funding research with all this money they feel they shouldn't be allowed to keep (from their tax cut).